Rockford debuts new approach to police work

Sunday

Jan 19, 2014 at 12:38 PMJan 19, 2014 at 9:02 PM

By Jeff KolkeyRockford Register Star

ROCKFORD - Hours before dawn Sunday, Matt Brieschke was among the 10 Rockford Police Department officers to report for the city's first 12-hour shift as part of what police brass hope is a new approach to police work.

They volunteered to staff Rockford's inaugural Pilot Police District, an initial foray into what is called geographic policing. It's an approach that encourages police officers to go beyond a focus on standard patrol work and into solving neighborhood crime problems as part of a team assigned to specific areas of the city.

"We are going to have so many people in one area, that I think we are going to get a lot accomplished," said Brieschke as he readied and checked his vehicle in the still dark and frigid Sunday morning for the shift ahead.

Brieschke said he volunteered because he likes the 12-hour shift schedule better than the 10-hour shift it replaces, and for the chance to be part of the pilot district.

They will focus on a central swath of the city that includes the busiest areas of Rockford in terms of police calls for service and includes what remain high-crime areas along the Kishwaukee Street, Broadway and Seventh Street corridors.

While Rockford as a whole saw the number of shots-fired incidents fall in 2013, District 2, as the area of the Pilot Police District is known to the department, saw an increase of 10.3 percent to 160 shots-fired incidents.

Similar to other parts of Rockford, burglaries fell 23 percent and robberies fell 9 percent in 2013 in the district.

Assistant Deputy Chief Doug Pann, commander of the pilot district, said if successful, those crime numbers will begin to fall in 2014.

Eventually the idea is to decentralize command and divide Rockford into three police districts, each with its own police station and commander. City officials are considering proposals for locations. If approved, the stations are expected to house commanders, detectives, patrol officers and other officers assigned specifically to that area of the city, Pann said.

Unable to establish a separate headquarters in time for the Pilot Police District debut, a unused corner of the Public Safety Building that once housed the Winnebago County Sheriff's Office has been carved out for the Pilot Police District.

"These guys are going to be working in that same geographic area of the city every day," Pann said. "It's not all about the building. One of the major factors of it is internal change, organizational change in the way we do things on a daily basis."

Although a separate building to house the district - closer, more accessible for residents and perhaps with public meeting space - would have been ideal, the district is about more than that, Lt. Darin Spades told officers assembled for the district's first roll call.

It alters the command structure and creates unity of command so that officers consistently report to the same supervisor on a daily basis, where before there were routinely different sergeants for vacation, equipment and training.

They will work alongside detectives and neighborhood response officers (a new designation for an officer who does a combination of community service and M-3 streets team work) assigned to the same area as the patrol officers.

It also designates commanders who are responsible for crime fighting in the specific areas of the city they are patrolling.

And when a patrol officer finds a crime hot spot or drug house, instead of merely passing the information along to investigators and superiors, he will be involved in taking it down, Spades said.

"We want to involve you in things you probably have never done before," Spades told the officers. "If you find a problem house in your area, a dope house, prostitution, whatever it is ... if the detectives end up getting a search warrant for it or the neighborhood response guys, we want to involve you in actually going to those searches."

Jeff Kolkey: 815-987-1374; jkolkey@rrstar.com; @jeffkolkey

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